Facebook Tests Local Market Buying and Selling Feature

A number of Facebook users recently reported seeing the new feature appearing briefly in their Facebook iPhone app, sometimes in place of the “Messenger” button, Tech Crunch reported. The feature, which is only in testing but not broadly distributed, is a more structured marketplace aimed at buyers and sellers, allowing Facebook users to browse through or post items to sell across a variety of product categories like autos, appliances, furniture, clothing, household, kids, books, and much more. The new section included both a ‘Buy’ and ‘Sell’ interface, as well as a way to search across the marketplace for particular items using keywords.

Users could customize their own Local Market by selecting “collections” they wanted to follow such as “Everything Free,” “Men’s clothes,” “Top Cars,” “Dress for Less,” and others. When you post in Local Market, people who live near you will see your item in Local Market under Favourites.” Some users told us that Local Market was only live for them for a brief time – like, around two hours. According to Engadget, the feature also allows users to cross-post their items for sale in the Local Market feature when adding an item for sale in a Facebook group.

These sale groups, for those unfamiliar, are one of the more popular ways people are using Facebook Groups today, as they provided neighborhoods and communities with tools to browse, search, buy and sell in an online garage sale-like format. It has since rolled out more tools for those groups, including a “Sell” feature that allowed members to create posts where they could add a description, set a price, and set a pick-up or delivery location. The addition, however, had the side benefit of adding more structure to what were before just text posts accompanying photos – something that could help Facebook roll out a more robust marketplace like Local Market. The social platform is also testing other features for these sales groups such as notifications, recommendations and saved searchers aimed at improving the selling and buying experience for people in groups. I’m personally in at least a dozen nearby sale groups, which can be challenging when you’re trying to find something specific, like a coffee table or used bike, for example.